he
community. The species is recruited from among its failures and from
among less civilised aliens. Contemporary civilisations are in effect
burning the best of their possible babies in the furnaces that run the
machinery. In the United States the native Anglo-American strain has
scarcely increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European
countries the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic
elements in the community. The women of these classes still remain
legally and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural
excuse for their dependence gone....

The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory
groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless effort
to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a solitary child
grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes that do no more
than continue the culture of the parents at a great social cost, here
numbers of unhappy educated but childless married women, here careless,
decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the heedlessly
begotten. It is just the disorderly proliferation of Bromstead over
again, in lives instead of in houses.

What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying boundaries,
pushing research and discovery, building cities, improving all the
facilities of life, making great fleets, waging wars, while this aimless
decadence remains the quality of the biological outlook?...

It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion until
I faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had it clear
in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than participate in all the
surrenders of mind and body that are implied in Dayton's snarl of "Leave
it alone; leave it all alone!" Marriage and the begetting and care of
children, is the very ground substance in the life of the community.
In a world in which everything changes, in which fresh methods, fresh
adjustments and fresh ideas perpetually renew the circumstances of life,
it is preposterous that we should not even examine into these matters,
should rest content to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a
barbaric age.

Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the
solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together, are
right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out from our
IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to say of ad